The present invention relates to a process and to an apparatus for the continuous manufacture of an emulsion and to the emulsion thereby obtained.
At present, the preparation of emulsions on an industrial scale calls for numerous operations amongst which the proportioning of the different components of the emulsion is most often carried out in fixed amounts, the components being weighed before being raised to the temperature of emulsion, that is to say most often in the solid state, then transported and introduced into a melting or casting pot before being then introduced into an emulsifying vat to make the emulsion as such. The combination of these operations is long and costly because the operations of weighing in particular, are often carried out separately and cannot be introduced in a simple manner in an industrial process. In fact, the preparation of emulsion on an industrial scale can hardly in principle, even to this day, be differentiated from the extemporaneous preparation of pharmaceutical emulsions except by the quantity of components in question. For this reason, the emulsions presently prepared on an industrial scale are limited in quantity, which most often does not exceed in weight one ton per day.
to the inconveniences already mentioned, is added the inconvenience because of the relatively small quantity prepared per pouring, of a lack of homogeneity between the batches of product made. This lack takes on an extreme importance in the case of pharmaceutical emulsions for which the tolerances from one batch to another are particularly strict.